SoHo Retains Its Outdoor Mall Status

Busy, busy SoHo (via beige inside's flickr stream).

After a recession slow down, the outdoor mall that is SoHo is back, baby. The Times today looks in on the area below Houston and finds the area bursting with shops and shoppers—the last few months have seen more than twenty stores, both regular and of the pop-up variety, open in the area with many more coming. And it isn't just that the stores are opening, clever marketing has meant almost everyother day there seems to a block-long line for this or that hot new thing.

And about those pop-ups? The reason there have been so many over the past few years is that when the recesssion hit and rents dropped "smart landlords resisted signing long-term leases, and instead invited in temporary tenants." Which makes sense.

Of course, not everyone is happy about the resurgence though. Specifically the people who, y'know, live in SoHo and enjoyed the additional walking room the recession afforded them. As Sean Sweeney, the director of the SoHo Alliance, put it: “Who wants to live in a shopping mall? Who wants to burst through a phalanx of tourists who walk three or four abreast, as slowly as possible?”

All of which reminds us of the time in the late-80s when we were growing up in the East Village. "What do you want to do today?" our mother asked her children one spring Saturday. "Let's walk over to Broadway and watch the tourists!" replied our sister in all seriousness. Because back then tourists and shoppers below Houston were still a novelty. That was then.

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By Garth Johnston in News on December 2, 2010 3:40 PM

Comments [rss]

OSN!

Human population increases exponentially. The number of vehicles on the road increases exponentially. There's never a decrease. So if you think everything seems to be getting more crowded and congested all the time, it's not your imagination.

As my dad used to say: It's getting to be God damn ridiculous.

Alamo L7

Tourists 4 abreast? I thought those were bedbugs...

mocanlagunas

“Who wants to live in a shopping mall? Who wants to burst through a phalanx of tourists who walk three or four abreast, as slowly as possible?”

Me, if I could afford it...

crybabies...

thenicholas

Heh. Phalanx.

IvoryJive

If you "don't want to live in a shopping a mall" then either you don't want to live in Soho, or you are delusional about what the neighborhood has become in the last 30 years. The problems Sweeney describes are problems of pedestrian crowing - being forced to burst through groups of people slowly walking three or four abreast. Yet he was the most vocal opponent to city plans to experiment with creating more space for walking: http://www.streetsblog.org/200...

Automocar

They should just close the entirety of Broadway to vehicles from the Battery to Columbus Circle.

IvoryJive

Well it's like half way there already

nicemarmot

Who wants to live in a shopping mall...not me, yet I seem to anyway. God forbid I be able to walk a block west from my apartment without running into seven thousand tourists per block, every one of them gawking at the same stupid displays they all gawk at every year. And of course 99% of them never buy anything, which has to be just great for the merchants.

I don't know what the hell they're talking about with the recession clearing out the sidewalks. Maybe in Soho, but not here in midtown.